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W\VW.JEN IBICK.COM THE PRIVATE LIFE OF MARIE ANTOINElTE A MEMOI R BY MADAME CAMPAN HER LADY-IN-WAITING WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD 1S00BOOKS.COM Fabulous Hair, Skin & Nails and Bio-Coat, Fine Biotin Supplements for People and Pets ftom Nickers International Ltd Call1-800-NICKERS, 1-800-642-5377, visit our web site: www.nickint.com J Ar' UES Crog et & Chess !_rden Games Indoor Games JA UES ! f795 i LON DON ____I 877 -374-8881 . . .]1lqueSamerICa.COm AMERICA w 182 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 27, 2006 THE ART WORLD QUEEN OF AR.TS A retrospective ofKiki Smith at the Whitney. BY PETER 5CHJELDAHL G reat artists work from and for history, where no one lives. Kiki Smith, the subject of a tangy retrospec- tive at the Whitney, "Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005," works from and for the moment, shared by everybody. She is a major figure-long the leading light of communally minded downtown avant-gardes-who makes minor art. Her sculpture, drawings, and prints be- token general concepts and generic sen- timents; however striking, their form is arbitrary. The best known illustrate car- nal facts and poetic associations of the human body. Take, for example, a wall- hung iron rendition of the digestive sys- tem (1988); a floor piece of swarming crystal sperm (1989-90); and "Virgin Mary' (1992), a life-size, reverentlypos- tured female figure, in beeswax, that is partly flayed, its musculature on livid dis- play. Lately, Smith has developed a fan- ciful bestiary-wolves and birds, espe- cially-with fairy-tale affinities for states of human fear and desire. "Daughter" (1999), a life-size Little Red Riding Hood made of paper, cloth, and hair, ap- pears to be metamorphosing into a were- wolf; an electronic soundtrack, by the composer Margaret De Wys, contributes appropriate growls and squeaks. Cosmic awe is a recurrent theme: lots of stars, in many shapes and mediums. Smith's works are always fiercely adept, inventive, and even elegant, but their aesthetic quality tracks, rather than transcends, her thoughts and feelings. They serve an at- titude that combines a forthright de- sire to seduce and a mischievous will to shock. It is tempting to say that Smith's chief creation is herself a neo-hippie queen of bohemia and-what with her wild hair, sharp features, pale skin, and abundant little blue tattoos of rings and stars-an avatar of the Addams Family. A recent profile by Michael Kimmelman, in the Times Magazine, captured her charisma: "ethereal and laughing," in perpetual motion as a creator and in teeming com- panyas a doyenne. (To not like her would require a knack for bitterness.) But Smith is a grounded product of breeding and circumstance, with noth- ing made up about her. She is a New York School aristocrat. Her father was the sculptor Tony Smith, a close friend of Barnett Newman, and, rather like her- self: an artist whose significance exceeds the sum of his material achievements. (His commanding geometric works only partly fulfill a visionary genius that both anticipated and overleaped minimalism.) Kiki and her sisters served their father as studio assistants and grew up on easy terms with art-world celebrities. Kiki's knockabout biography-as a college dropout and, before her art-world suc- cess, a baker, electrician's assistant, sur- veyor, garment worker, census taker, short-order cook, and bartender-re- calls bohemian eras when artists lived as lumpen proletarians, at home with the working class. The last such era involved Smith's own generation, albeit as some- thing of a conceit: principled downward social mobility. Smith cannot be understood except as an exemplar-and survivor-of a scene that boomed in N ew York in the early nineteen-eighties. That epoch of punk music, performance art, political anar- chism, polymorphous sexuality, gallery graffiti, funky feminism, populist con- federacies of artists (CoLab, ABC No Rio), and prevalent bad habits was done in by factors including gentrification and, above all, AIDS. The wave of death en- gulfed Smith's sister Beatrice and a great many friends. The catastrophe-practi- cally forgotten in todays money-drugged, supercilious art world-fostered a move- ment, in the nineties, of art that mar- shalled political grievance. (A downturn in the art market boosted the trend, which nestled in art institutions. Cho- leric installational art was just the thing for a burgeoning circuit of biennial exhi-